


two can keep a secret (if one of them is dead)

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: classified? i know all about that [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bad Parenting, Childhood Trauma, Excellent Parenting, F/M, Family Secrets, Inheritance, Jakku, Jedha, Medical Trauma, Religion, Rey Palpatine, Sex Work, The Force, the Hosnian System, this is both happier and funnier than the tags make it look
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 22:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15301497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Palpatine leaves a legacy he never finds out about. (The mother of his child sees to that.)Seventy years later, Rey doesn't go looking for it. (Leia understands.)





	two can keep a secret (if one of them is dead)

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to celeste9/serceleste for the beta.
> 
> Astarea Katsaros' career was inspired by reading Katie Hickman's Courtesan, which I heartily recommend.

Senator Palpatine is normal, as politicians go, as humans can be. He has his foibles; his fondness for luxury, his interest in history, and tendency to favour the careers of the young and otherwise overlooked. He is nothing out of the ordinary. Well-spoken. Well-connected. Well-thought-of.

 

He doesn’t keep a mistress, but like most men of his age and station in life, he is well-acquainted with the Coruscant demi-monde, the parts of it that make it into society papers, not tabloids. That’s where he meets Astarea.

 

Astarea isn’t her real name, and Astarea is clever enough to be certain that Senator Palpatine knows that. She’s too old to be fooled by his charm and his genteel manners into thinking he’s as kindly as he tries to seem. There’s a certain kind of senator who goes for courtesans inexperienced both in life and in their profession, that like to think they’re better than the ones who bring in aides in their late teens with no political education or official role, but that’s not Senator Palpatine. He favours Astarea, quietly and discreetly as gentlemen handle these sort of things, a cultured lady in her mid to late thirties who maintains a salon that attracts some of the cleverest minds and most influential people in the galaxy. (These two Venn diagram circles don’t always overlap, but both of them are in her spacious, elegant drawing room, and at least one of them doesn’t have to _pretend_ to understand the Alderaanian senator talking linguistics and literature.)

 

Astarea enjoys his intellect, and she finds him generous. She’s not sure she likes him, though he undoubtedly has great charm, and she is convinced that his company is unsafe.

 

When she falls pregnant she assesses her life and takes a decision. It’s not that she couldn’t stay on Coruscant and have the baby. It’s not that she needs to have a baby at all. It’s not as if adoption isn’t an option she could take. But Coruscant is starting to pall on her, and truth be told, she feels it’s time she moved on. She’s made a great deal of money in a fifteen-year career, and unlike some of her unfortunate colleagues, she’s always been good with numbers, savings accounts and stock markets.

 

She takes it for granted that Senator Palpatine will not be acknowledging the paternity of his child. In fact, she doesn’t even mention that she’s pregnant - to him or to anyone except a med droid that can’t talk. There’s nothing gentle about the glittering world she lives in. Confidentiality is a lie.

 

They have dinner together, at a very quiet, very expensive restaurant where their presence - and amicable relations - will be noted. Astarea has taken medical advice and heavily restricts her alcohol intake. But she never drinks much, anyway, and Senator Palpatine is not prone to that kind of temptation either.

 

Astarea tells him she’s thinking of studying for a doctorate at last. Something historical, but whether philosophy or finance she can’t decide.

 

“I’ve always admired your financial acumen,” the senator says very seriously, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “But you do also have a fine philosophical mind. History of philosophy of the Force, perhaps?”

 

“I’m intrigued by the pagan philosophies of the Outer Rim,” Astarea says idly, “prior to the educative Jedi expeditions of two thousand years ago.”

 

“Educative. Yes, indeed.” Senator Palpatine stares off into the middle distance, and then brings his attention back to her and smiles. “I wouldn’t want to influence your decision. It’s a significant undertaking, a doctorate.”

 

Astarea nods gravely.

 

“Do send me a copy of your thesis. I would be most intrigued.” Senator Palpatine hasn’t stopped smiling.

 

“That’s very kind of you,” Astarea says.

 

When Astarea leaves Coruscant for the Hosnian system, Senator Palpatine sends her beautiful crystal flowers and expresses punctilious regret at her departure. She replies with a charming note and puts the flowers in a little-used guest bedroom. When she finishes her dissertation she sends him a copy of it. Although she suspects he never reads it, certainly not in those heady post-Naboo Crisis days, she does receive a few lines on headed paper from the Chancellor’s office.

 

She ruffles her daughter’s curls and stares thoughtfully at the vidscreen as Chancellor Palpatine speaks in the Senate. She’s very grateful that Berenike resembles her so closely. And she never intends to set foot on Coruscant again.

 

It would have been exciting to be the Chancellor’s preferred companion. She knows women of her former rank and profession in Coruscant who would have killed for the opportunity. But Astarea has no taste for exciting, and she doesn’t think he ever cared the snap of his fingers for her. She’s not sure he cares the snap of his fingers for the galaxy.

 

She maintains the kind of ladylike discretion the Chancellor would expect, if he knew about her daughter and had any reason to believe the girl was his: by happy accident it’s also the kind of ladylike discretion that will keep her and her daughter safe. Accordingly, she never tells Berenike who her father is.

 

Thank all the little gods that the girl’s only curiosities are intellectual. She makes an excellent property lawyer, and she’s not interested in leaving the Hosnian system. She does ask about her father once or twice, but quickly turns her attention to questions which have answers.

 

Astarea lives long enough to watch Berenike marry and divorce, and to meet her grandson Amyntas and spoil him as she never spoiled Berenike: it feels safer. When she dies, many people who attended her salon send letters of condolence and marks of remembrance. Chancellor Palpatine remarks on the sad loss of a most remarkable lady to Senator Organa. Senator Organa, who is far too young to have met handsome, cultured Astarea forty years ago and has very little interest in the historical finance of early spacefaring expansionist polities, bows and murmurs something polite.

 

Chancellor Palpatine doesn’t feel the need to indulge in any further appropriate grieving. If Astarea knew, she’d be glad.

 

Amyntas reaches his official majority in the heady years immediately after the Battle of Endor, when no Imperial power can stand before Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker. He thinks about his late grandmother, courtesan and historian, who loved quality, disliked ostentation, and was never happier than when taking an unexpected sharp left turn, and he considers running away to join the Rebel Alliance.

 

Berenike, who may be less adventurous than Astarea was but is every bit as practical, points out that he has absolutely no aptitude for combat.

 

Amyntas takes this onboard and spends some time in his grandmother’s study. When he emerges, he’s carrying a datapad full of Astarea’s books, and he’s just spent a significant amount of his inheritance from her on a round-trip ticket to Jedha. While Astarea’s second career was in the study of historical finance, carefully steered away from anything remotely topical, she nonetheless retained a strong interest in the history of religious philosophy.

  
“It’s probably better than running off to fight for Leia Organa,” Berenike’s ex-husband points out, as they wave Amyntas off at the spaceport. “He’s only eighteen. He’ll get over it. And Jedha’s not that dangerous these days. It’s fairly stable. Nothing like the damage that was done to Scarif.”

 

Berenike has a very pinched look about her mouth as she acknowledges that he probably has the right of it. He’s a geological engineer and a celebrated terraformer, and she does expensive conveyancing.

 

Astarea would recognise that expression from Senator Palpatine’s face. She would also recognise the truth of Berenike’s suspicions: Amyntas doesn’t come back the same person from Jedha, any more than Astarea came back the same person from Coruscant. He’s carrying much lighter luggage, for one thing, and seems to have dispensed with most of the toys and gadgets a well-to-do Hosnian adolescent would consider indispensable. He’s dressed in a version of a Guardian’s clothes: not robes, but a jacket in the same colours and a similar style. He’s carrying a staff, and wearing silka beads wrapped around one wrist.

 

His hazel eyes are as large and bright as Berenike’s mother’s were, but they have a peace in them that her mother’s never had. Astarea often looked relaxed, but Berenike knew her well enough to realise that she never, ever was.

 

The family dinner they have to celebrate Amyntas’s return goes badly; Theo is annoyed that Amyntas refuses to commit to settling down and taking up his studies, but the calm in Amyntas’s eyes is never shaken, even when Theo shouts. Berenike tries not to flinch. She has always disliked raised voices and breaches of etiquette, and she knows that Amyntas gets his mannered stubbornness from her side of the family. There will be no changing his mind.

 

It’s not until she’s eating breakfast and listening to the news the next day that she realises Amyntas hasn’t said what he wants to do. She thinks about the silka beads, and the spacer boots, and the staff he carries like he knows how to use it, and her heart sinks, cold, cold, to the floor.

 

Berenike waits till they’re having evening tea in the gardens in the first blush of dusk before she asks him anything, and when she does, she’s surprised to find that the words out of her mouth aren’t ‘tell me about Jedha’, they are ‘tell me about the Force’.

 

Amyntas’s face lights up with a steady inner glow, and Berenike listens to her son talk with a growing sense of dread. At least for a while there will be no university, no steady job, no career, no flat in one of the nicer neighbourhoods. Her son went to Jedha and fell in love with the Force which is seen in its effects, as the wind is marked by the movement in the leaves and the shifting of the sand, and - though Berenike knows he’s not Force-sensitive, any more than she is - he can sense its balance around him. He worships it for its promise of new life and hope, of balance. He talks of the Empire as Darkness, and even Berenike is well-informed enough to know that if corruption and repression are Dark then that was indeed so. She did not suffer, under Imperial rule, but she knows others were less fortunate.

 

And of course, there’s always the memory of Alderaan, which still makes Berenike’s blood run cold.

 

Amyntas will teach, he says. Literacy and civics. And he will preach, if it is given to him to do so. But a large part of the faith of the Guardians of the Whills lay in works. Their travelling priests were never purely priests, with no other function; those who remained at the temples might be so, but there are few temples left. Every sentient of the Guardians now alive has a purpose besides prayer, or makes their purpose part of their prayer, or -

 

“I’m afraid I was never very good at theology,” Berenike says, weakly.

 

Amyntas kisses her on the forehead.

 

He stays a month, and then he’s gone, and Berenike knows, somehow, that she will never see him in the flesh again.

 

She takes a few days off work to be miserable. She’s been a partner for more than a decade: she can afford to do that, particularly if Theo doesn’t come to hear of it. She can almost hear his impatient irritation, grating on her nerves.

 

After a day by herself in her apartment with nothing but holofilms and meals brought to her door by someone who does the home cooking somewhere else, Berenike puts on old, comfortable shoes and takes a sleeper train to the hanging gardens she used to visit as a girl, strictly for the historical interest. She would have liked to be married there, but Theo didn’t like the idea, and her mother stared carefully at the political situation and advised against.

 

The hanging gardens are called the Temple of Courtsilius once more, and there are priestesses of the Force living in their grounds. Berenike does not think they asked permission. She seeks one out for a blessing and bows her head, and thinks they did not need to.

 

She feels so peaceful here that before she’s even had lunch she books a room for two nights in the old guesthouse they have cleaned out, pays in kind with supplies ordered on the holonet, and pops out into the city that encircles the hanging gardens to buy pants, a toothbrush and a clean shirt for her stay.

 

(Theo would be furious for no good reason, but Berenike can almost hear Amyntas laughing - and her mother, smiling as if puzzled.)

 

She wakes early the next day and walks out into the gardens, loses herself at the top of the rock formation the hanging gardens are trained down from. It’s a surprisingly large area and Berenike is not very fit. Her calves hurt. She sits down to stare at the dawn.

 

“Uh,” says a voice, young, male, assured but bashful, Outer Rim. “You should be careful up here. I’m not sure it’s very structurally sound.”  
  
It’s just what Theo would say, but Theo would make it an order. Berenike carefully doesn’t bristle.

 

“I thought it would be all right,” she says. “It’s a public place. Surely…”  


“It hasn’t been maintained.” The young man - and he is young, only a few years younger than Amyntas, with sandy brown-blond hair darkened and pasted to his forehead by sweat and one of those handsome everyman faces who could be any of a thousand people, dressed in colourful working clothes like a spacer or a mechanic - sits down next to her. “I was talking to the priestesses about it last night.”

 

“Are you a guest here as well?” Berenike asks.

 

“No,” he smiles. “Just passing through.” He hesitates, and asks: “What brings you here?”

 

“I don’t know,” Berenike says.

 

They watch the sun rise for a while.

 

“My son has just… left the planet,” Berenike says. “I’m not sure he will ever come back.”

 

She feels the weight of the stranger’s kind blue eyes on her, and looks down at her knees. He lays one of his hands on hers - his are calloused and light - and says: “No-one is ever truly gone.”

 

It should be a worthless platitude, but in his mouth it has real weight.

 

“I have to go now,” says the stranger. “My brother-in-law will whine if I’m late back.” He stands, and then pauses, and says, very gently: “May the Force be with you.”

 

Berenike bows her head for this second blessing. She lifts her eyes to the sky when he’s gone and stares unseeing into the distance as the sun paints her face.

 

She still wants to cry. But now she thinks she understands.

 

 

Amyntas always has a forwarding address for his mother. Some spaceship crews find it vaguely amusing but the settlements he stops in tend to take it as a point in his favour: he may be rootless and wandering, this priest of a scattered company, but he isn’t without community. He writes to Berenike whenever he can. More often as he gets older.

 

He makes sure to tell her about Cam, because Cam is the first person Berenike has ever asked to hear more about.

 

Cam is the only other human onboard the _Smiling Mynoc_ _k_ , and the only human member of the permanent crew, since Amyntas will be disembarking once they reach Polanis. Cam has grey eyes and a soft chin and freckles. Cam speaks five languages, which is three more than Amyntas does. She has never set foot on planetary ground for longer than three standard days at a time. She can do anything with a nacelle propulsor, whatever one of those is, and nearly anything with a hyperdrive.

 

Amyntas falls in love with her as easily and quickly and completely as he fell in love with the Force of Others. He thinks he’s being sentimental when he sees it in her smile, but if that’s so, then sentimental is all he ever wants to be.

 

“Bring her back to Courtsilius,” Berenike says, “I want to meet this girl. And I haven’t seen you in years, Amyntas.”  
  
“I know, I know,” Amyntas says. “I’m sorry.”

 

“I want to come,” Cam says, laughing. “I’ll stay on planet for as long as it takes to actually get to know you, Berenike -”

 

Amyntas’ mother smiles like she really, really means it, even though it wavers over the holonet connection. A sunstorm somewhere.

 

Cam translates his civics and literacy materials into Huttese, because she says just Bocce is not enough after the years of Hutt influence spreading around this sector, and helps him with his lesson plans in her off hours. Amyntas sits by her and passes her tools while she crawls into ducts to fix things. He doesn’t know what to do with any of them, but he marked all the handles with coloured tape so he can hand her the right ones. Their shipmates say they are adorable, for tailless creatures that cannot correctly express themselves. The captain is openly planning for two contingencies: firstly, that Cam will choose to disembark on Polanis with Amyntas, and secondly, that Amyntas will remain with the crew as long as Cam does.

 

Cam laughs like she’s delighted. Amyntas smiles so hard his face hurts.

 

He has never feared any of the dark, dangerous or merely dubious places he’s been to: he is one with the Force and the Force is with him, and whatever happens is its will. Now he fears that something he can control, if only he tries hard enough, will separate him and Cam.

 

He prays a lot more than he used to, and - because it offers a legal status that will protect them and their partnership - when Cam locates someone with a claim to be called a Jedi, and proposes marriage, Amyntas says yes.

 

He still can’t feel the Force. But when Ezra Bridger, looking a bit perplexed, presses Amyntas’s hand to Cam’s and declares them one, Amyntas feels something settle into place, deep within him. Something right.

 

His father disowns him, of course. Amyntas times out all the angry holocalls on mute, and quite frequently while doing something else in a different cabin of the ship - he learned a long time ago that while the secret to Theo’s anger is to let it burn itself out, there is no reason he must listen while that happens - and changes his legal surname to his mother’s. He’s already been using Katsaros socially for years. His father terraformed a number of the planets he’s visited, not always to the benefit of the pre-existing inhabitants.

 

“Does this mean my name is Cam Katsaros?” Cam says, sliding her arms around Amyntas’s waist.  
  
He kisses her. “If you want it to be, sweetheart.”

 

Berenike sends them an open invitation to her house on Courtsilius, two thousand credits, and a copy of her will, which reflects Amyntas’s new name, and acknowledges Cam as Amyntas’s spouse.

 

“We absolutely have to go back to Courtsilius,” Cam says, seeing this. She takes Amyntas’s hand, the hand Ezra Bridger joined to hers, and rests it over her abdomen. “I want to meet her before our baby gets to.”  
  
Amyntas doesn’t think even the Force can encompass his joy in that moment.

 

Unfortunately, they don’t get to Courtsilius before the baby’s born, and the birth is difficult, which wipes out the two thousand credits Berenike sent and then some. Amyntas misses, for the first time, the power he had on Courtsilius to solve problems with the money he inherited, and the security of Core living, where prenatal care is easy to hand and nobody dies in childbirth. Hardship he can bear for himself, but not for Cam and not for the baby.

 

The Force’s will is immanent and impersonal. Amyntas cannot blame it for turning Cam pale with blood loss, for the nurse holding back their daughter’s every bottle of milk until he’s proven he can pay for it. Still, his thanksgiving is all the more sincere when they have escaped the clinic, when Cam can walk again without leaning on his arm, and hold their little girl without fearing she’s a bad mother and will break her.

 

Names are a problem. Their daughter was registered at the clinic as Baby Katsaros because Cam was dying and Amyntas was out of his remaining mind, but for the first few months she’s just Baby, and the rest of crew calls her Spawn (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to call a child, provided you’re Theelin).

 

“I would like to call her something other than Spawn,” Berenike suggests over yet another crackly holocomm connection, looking mildly weary.

 

Amyntas doesn’t mention that paying off the medical debt - which they’ve just done from the ship’s insurance - before an enforcer came after Cam and the child was the priority. There are some things his mother doesn’t need to know about his life.

 

Cam and Amyntas sit down and apply their minds to the problem.

 

Berenike is out. On Parmathe, where Cam’s from, they don’t name babies after people who are still living. Cam says she has no relatives whose name she’d care to burden a child with, and they can’t think of any derivatives of their own names they like. Their galactic heroes are everyone else’s galactic heroes - Leia and Lucy are very popular girls’ names, and every second toddling boy seems to be Lean or Luke, to say nothing of the sea of little Hans and Hannas with Corellian accents -  and none of the Parmathen or Hosnian names they turn over seem right. The less said about the various Theelin suggestions floated at them, the better.

 

Eventually, Amyntas stares down at Baby scowling as she clutches at the bottle, and is struck by a sudden memory of his grandmother, frowning down at a piece of departmental correspondence she wasn’t pleased with.

  
_Astarea_ , he thinks, and something settles into place deep within him, solid and definite and _right_. It seems stupid - a name from a scowl and a single blood tie - but some things in life, Amyntas has noticed, are stupid, and that doesn’t make them any less solid.

 

“What do you think of Astarea?” he says out loud. “It was my grandmother’s name. She was a courtesan on Coruscant before the Empire, and then she became a historian of finance. It was her interest in the Force, her books, the stories she used to tell me of the Jedi on Coruscant, that led me to the priesthood.”  
  
“Astarea,” Cam says thoughtfully and very sleepily, rolling onto her back on their bunk in order to speak. “It’s pretty.” She sits up with a grunt of effort and holds out her arms. “Give her to me.”

 

The baby has just finished her bottle. Amyntas hands her over and keeps back the bottle, for cleaning.

 

“Astarea,” Cam repeats, and the baby smiles gummily. “I like it.” She kisses their daughter’s forehead. “Rey for short.”  
  
“Perfect,” Amyntas says, and makes a mental note to update Rey’s geneprint, next time they stop at a planet worth the name.

 

Rey is a quiet baby, though not a good sleeper, and grows into a quiet child. She shrieks her head off for three hours before the pirates board. She is hoarse and whimpering when they shoot her father through the head to prove they mean business.

 

“Shut that kid up,” the second mate tells Cam, blaster pointed at her face. “Or we’ll do it for you.”

 

Cam’s terror and grief get caught between her teeth, along with her scream. She only nods, and keeps Rey close every single minute, even when she crawls into the most dangerous and most difficult parts of the ships she is ordered to attend to. It’ll be harder for them to sell Rey into slavery if Cam is with her every moment. Not much harder, but slightly - especially if Cam can make a case that Rey, who has her father’s wits and her mother’s quick hands with mechanics, is valuable right here. And it will be much easier for her to take Rey and escape if they are always together.

 

Cam grows too scarred to hope. But when she crash-lands a small ship-to-ground tender on Jakku and is successful in making it look as if everyone on board died an accidental death, and manages to pass two weeks on the planet’s surface with her daughter and with no signs of pursuit, she begins, cautiously, to pray.

 

She leaves Rey with Unkar Plutt because she can’t work passage to Yarrow - the only town nearby with effective inter-system communication - for both of them, and Rey is now too big to be hidden or to count as her baby. She signs an indenture because Plutt insists, but it’s small enough that Cam will be able to pay it off if she can only access Amyntas’s accounts once more. She can prove she isn’t dead with the geneprint Amyntas signed her up for, and she has a sample of Rey’s hair to confirm the link between their prints and identify her daughter as Astarea Katsaros, heir to anything wealthy, patient, weary Berenike cares to give her. Berenike is kind and she likes Cam. She loves Astarea already. If Cam can only contact Berenike, it will all be fine.

 

“It’ll only be for a few days,” Cam promises, “only until I can contact your grandmother,” before she climbs in the quadjumper to make a short hop they’re only making because they really need her to fix their nacelles. She cuts a harder bargain than anyone on this planet, but she’s also the best they’re going to get, and they know it.

 

“Mama,” Rey shrieks, and Cam tries to ignore the way it sounds like her cries the day the pirates came, and tore their family to shreds.

 

There’s a street accident in Yarrow – a bad one. The dead are identified by teeth and by clothes, where possible, and are checked for geneprints as a matter of routine, though this far from the Core the coroner considers it a waste of time. He finds only one match.

  
Cam Katsaros, thirty-one, deceased. Planet of origin, Parmathe. Daughter, Astarea Katsaros, status unknown. Husband, Amyntas Katsaros, status unknown.

 

Berenike weeps, and then she searches, but she can’t find either her son or her granddaughter. She updates her will herself; she’s still a practising solicitor, and she has the right to do so. In an act of spiteful pettiness she embraces more than she should, she forces Theo to witness it. She places half her money in an offshore trust fund for Astarea Katsaros, should she ever live to claim it, and gives the other half to the priestesses of the Temple of Courtsilius, where she retires for the remainder of her days.

  
Berenike dies at the top of the rock formation where she met Luke Skywalker, steadfast and unbroken, staring into the bright light of Starkiller Base.

 

She still doesn’t know who her father is, but then again, she’s never cared.

 

 

Twenty years after Cam Katsaros died on Jakku, the war is only half over and a young Jedi has just learned her father’s name. Leia is sure she ought to be struck by the parallels to Luke, but she isn’t.

 

Here, after all, is another young woman who watched her planet and the last of her family die. She just didn’t know it at the time. Watching Rey’s numb face, Leia wonders if this constitutes an improvement.

 

Maybe.

 

Colonel Kalonia had only run Rey’s DNA against the geneprint database as a vague formality, since they were in Chandrila and had access to it. She had been as shocked as Rey was when a match actually came up.

 

“I don’t know what to do with this,” Rey says, clear and distant, like bells ringing very far away. Her thumb is flicking lightly over the datapad screen, scrolling up and down.

 

Astarea Katsaros, daughter of Cam Katsaros (mechanic, certified on Class Six through Nine spacecraft) and Amyntas Katsaros (Guardian of the Whills). Granddaughter of Theo Metaxas (engineer) and Berenike Katsaros (lawyer, later priestess). Great-granddaughter to an academic who studied some dusty area of finance Leia would have to outsource to Kaydel to understand. It seems to have benefited Rey, since she’s now heiress to a significant amount of money, held in trust for her for the next hundred years. There’s no data on any further relatives and Theo Metaxas’ name is greyed out, meaning that he disowned this branch of his family and only pertinent medical information can be accessed by a doctor. It’s the bare minimum he was required to do under Hosnian law for the child he fathered; the rule is the same on Chandrila, though not in other systems, and Leia remembers getting Han a geneprint so he could be connected to Ben’s.

 

“Show me where it’s written that you have to,” Leia says dryly. Only a few years ago Rey couldn’t even read.

 

Rey huffs, and then falls silent.

 

“They’re all gone,” she says, like she’s testing ice with her foot.

 

Leia says nothing. The dates of death that Rey’s looking at confirm it.

 

“Are you all right?” Leia says, eventually.

 

Rey turns off the datapad.

 

“Show me where it’s written that I have to be,” she answers, but she smiles.

 

Berenike Katsaros was a rather dull lawyer, Theo Metaxas cut his son’s family out of his will, and there’s nothing to say what happened to Amyntas, only that Cam met her end in an accident in a town called Yarrow on Jakku, an administrative centre not very far from Niima Outpost. The only pleasant association Leia can find with Rey’s birth family is the Temple of Courtsilius with its famous hanging gardens, so Leia buys her a decent print of it. Rey glues it to a bulkhead and buys some hanging baskets with the outrageous amount of money she now possesses.

 

Like Finn, whose surname in the legal record has been literally Blank for several years due to an unfortunate administrative oversight, she changes her name to Dameron, and unlike Finn, she takes no real interest in her birth family.

 

Leia asks Rey about it - making sure to be very clear that Leia herself has never dwelt on the memory of doomed and beautiful Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker who gave her birth, but not her life.

 

Rey’s hazel eyes go distant; her firm chin sets, and her eyes narrow just a little. Her mouth pinches slightly.

 

“I don’t want to look,” she says. “I’ve just got this feeling I might find something.”

  
  
Leia thinks of a nightmare in black armour and his laboured breath, and understands Rey better than she knows.

 

 


End file.
